


Between the Bars

by trinityofone



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: Amnesia, Consent Issues, Gay Bar, Incest, M/M, Somnophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-06 05:38:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/pseuds/trinityofone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aleksander doesn’t really have <em>friends</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Bars

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to turtlespeaks and fiveyearmission for encouragement and notes!

Aleksander doesn’t really have _friends_. He had doctors and nurses, then landlords and bosses; more recently he has investors and business associates and a steady rotation of assistants. But there are a few…acquaintances whose occasional company he finds not entirely intolerable. The barista at his local coffee shop is one. Despite her menial position (toward which, after even the mere weeks he spent mopping floors and emptying garbage bins, Aleksander feels pity but not express judgment), Nat has proven herself to have a mind that’s sharp and even a bit spiky: she’s not above playing little games with customers who are rude to her, affecting a wide-eyed innocence for the few minutely clever enough to catch on. Not to mention she makes a fantastic cappuccino.

He’s just ordered one—and is leaving Nat his change and then some—when he sees the warm smile his shameful sentimental side likes to pretend she saves solely for him waver, then turn hard. Aleksander looks over his shoulder: a hulking man in plaid has just entered the shop. Probably some hipster there to lecture Nat about fair-trade coffee—or else a big bumbling bear, lost and looking for the gay bar around the corner. He’s certainly giving Aleksander a look that suggests the latter, an expression of hunger that seems unlikely to be satisfied by Nat’s pastry selection. Aleksander raises an eyebrow at him, noncommittal, and with another quick glance at Nat’s shuttered expression, retreats to his usual table to watch this play out.

To his surprise, the strange man actually makes a move in his direction, striking out with another blast from those yearning eyes, bright and blue and hopeful. Then suddenly Nat is out from behind the counter, so fast Aleksander would swear she’d have had to leap over it. Though she’s maybe half his size, she gets right up in the man’s face. Aleksander takes a sip of his cappuccino, feigning disinterest as she hisses at him. “You shouldn’t be here.”

The look the stranger directs down at her is full of angry betrayal. Hmm. Perhaps Aleksander’s reading of the situation was entirely wrong: could this be an ex-boyfriend? Pity. He’d assumed Nat would have better taste.

The man’s hands clench into fists; Aleksander sets his cup down, glancing around the shop and pondering how best to intervene if necessary. There are only two other patrons: a college student with earbuds well-entrenched and a businessman determinedly involved with his newspaper. Neither of them looks up when the man, fists still clenched, begins to speak.

“I thought you would know better by now than to keep from me that which is mine.”

Aleksander finds himself…surprised by the tenor of the stranger’s voice. The accent, he tells himself: even in a city as cosmopolitan as New York, it’s odd to hear a little piece of (presumably) home.

Nat is not similarly affected. “I have nothing that belongs to you,” she says calmly. “And even if I did, I’d think _you_ would know by now that I’d take good care of it.”

The man lets out a little growl that’s not as amusing as it ought to be. Aleksander feels a bit breathless; this is better than the theater. He watches the man’s fists as they tighten, then loosen, impotently. “That task is mine by right—”

Nat stands with arms folded, impassive. “That’s not my understanding.”

Squeeze, release. The man’s gaze flickers to Aleksander, and Aleksander, not one to be easily embarrassed, stares back openly until the stranger looks away, looks down. When he next speaks to Nat his voice is quieter. “You could have _told_ me.”

“Could I?” Nat says. Then with a swift wipe of her hands down the sides of her apron, she’s back behind the counter, businesslike. “Let me make you a coffee. I remember how you like it.”

The man glances over at Aleksander again. Aleksander realizes with a lurch that he is no longer feigning anything; he doubts he could look away if he tried.

“Can I—” the man starts to ask Nat.

She slaps a to-go cup down on the counter with a bit too much force, punctuating the action with a sharp-toothed grin. The man takes it in his big hand, and frowning, leaves without another word.

The bell on the door jingles. _And—scene_ , Aleksander thinks, reclaiming his own—china—cup and taking a calming sip. “I think you owe me a story, Nat.”

Nat makes a noise that’s half-laugh, half-sigh. “It’d be a long, boring one.” She leans against the counter and lowers her voice to a conspiratorial tone. “Ex-boyfriend.”

“Ahh,” says Aleksander, thinking, _Lie_. “I figured as much.”

***

He pushes the lie—and the entirety of the crazy encounter that led to it—to the back of his mind and lets it run there like a quiet, unobtrusive program. Meanwhile, he sips his coffee, surfs the internet on his iPad. He logs onto his own app, Will of the Masses, with one of his many aliases, casts some deliberately dubious votes on a few of the more ludicrous questions—“Should I have a chopped salad or the chicken panini for lunch?”, “What should we name our daughter?”, “Should I take the 405 or the Sepulveda pass?”, “Should I tell my girlfriend about my foot fetish?”—then tinkers with a new draft of the pledge new users have to sign, promising to follow the results of other users’ voting _exactly_. 

He’s rising to leave when Nat calls out to him. “Alek, wait!”

She scurries around the counter, apron disposed of, hair set free of its elastic. Aleksander spends a moment in aesthetic appreciation. Then, “Are you headed somewhere?” she asks him.

“Nowhere in particular,” Aleksander says, after a moment.

She takes him gently by the arm. Friendly-like. “Come out with me? It’s been a rough day, I need to blow off some steam.”

She doesn’t mention the confrontation with the man in plaid, but that’s clearly what she’s meant to be referencing. Aleksander adds this new data to what he’s already collected and nods. 

“Excellent!” Nat says with a grin. She jerks her head over her shoulder. “I’ve got a change of clothes in the back. You can leave your stuff back there, too, unless you’d rather drop it at home?”

“I trust you,” says Aleksander. As if he’d ever keep anything remotely important on his _iPad_.

Still smiling, Nat leads him past the replacement barista, who blushes when she winks at him, then blushes deeper when Aleksander does the same. In the narrow back room, Nat flips open a locker and removes a short silvery skirt and a pair of black heels. When she starts to wriggle out of her trousers, Aleksander politely turns his back; he hears her low, earthy chuckle. “You’re a real gentleman, Alek.”

“Not really,” he says. “I’m catching a pretty good reflection off the paper towel dispenser.”

She laughs again, then hand on his shoulder, spins him around. She spreads her arms. “Like what you see?”

“You’re a heartbreaker,” he says. He means it as a compliment.

As she slips into her heels, he deposits his iPad in her locker. He’s wearing a grey waistcoat over a white shirt and his favorite $300 jeans. (The first pair he can remember buying himself, less than two years ago, were two dollars from Goodwill.) He decides to leave his coat but keep his scarf, and since Nat doesn’t say anything, he assumes his outfit is appropriate for wherever they’re going.

As it turns out, he’s a bit overdressed. Nat leads him out the shop’s back door and around the corner, repeatedly glancing over her shoulder as if she’s worried he can’t keep up with her. They go past the gay bar Aleksander was earlier given cause to bring to mind—and to another one a few blocks further away. He’s never been here before, but he likes it immediately: the lighting’s dim, not strobing and blinding; the decor’s ostentatious but without being crass. Nat leads him over to a corner where a plush, tall-backed red velvet booth conveniently opens up. Aleksander slides in beside her, rolling up his sleeves.

Nat presses close to his ear. “Bet by the end of the night,” she says, pinching the fabric of his shirt between red fingernails, “I can get you to take this thing off.”

“Darling,” he says, already unbuttoning his waistcoat, “you need only ask.”

She pouts a little when he puts the waistcoat back on over his newly naked chest, but not for long. Shots arrive at her summons. They drink. They dance. It’s…fun. He’s allowed himself little time for what would traditionally be considered fun since he left behind the hospital’s Scrabble set (annoyingly missing two Es, an A, an M, and both its Ys).

They settle into an easy rhythm. Nat’s impressed him from the beginning—something about her suggests a kindred spirit, a rare experience for him. But oh, it _is_ a pleasure to see all his suspicions confirmed, to watch her in action. No counter between them, she presses close, sliding her fingers between the buttons of his waistcoat. “Let’s play a game,” she whisper-shouts, never losing the thumping beat of the music, hips moving beneath his hands. “Pick someone. We’ll make him fall in love with you.”

“In love?” Aleksander laughs.

Nat shrugs playfully, sexily. “In lust, then. One song. One dance, and we’ll have him worshipping you.”

Aleksander feels the corners of his mouth twist up. “I think I like this game.”

He scans the room, weighing his options. Then he thinks, fuck it, and acts on impulse. He points Nat toward his chosen prey. The man isn’t even really dancing: he’s standing near the edge of the floor, a sleek brunet wearing a chic pair of silver-framed glasses and mostly ignoring the buzzed blond who keeps trying to chat him up in favor of repeatedly checking his smart phone. Aleksander enjoys imagining that he’s offering up the option of letting Mr. G.I. Joe score to Will of the Masses.

Nat nods and starts to wind her way across the floor toward their target. Aleksander catches her by the wrist, tugs her to him. Bending down, “We’re going to do this _my_ way,” he says. He smiles to see the curious tension in Nat’s watchful, clever eyes, the little betraying blink when he steps back—neatly avoiding a couple of men in cowboy hats who are practically humping in time to the music—and dips his shoulders into a gentlemanly bow. Then he steps close again, twining the fingers of his left hand together with her right.

He doesn’t ask her if she knows how to dance. How to _really_ dance, not fuck standing up. He can see it in the way she holds herself, her posture, her poise. There are certain things you never forget. He was born knowing how to speak and how to move with purpose and with grace, Aleksander who opened his eyes on this world without even a name. What an extraordinary person he must have been, Aleksander thinks sometimes. What an outstanding, remarkable, pitiable fool.

No, enough. He lifts his head, banishing this ghost of himself to the dark corners of the room, and he dances.

A little waltz. Small and contained at first. _One-two-three, one-two-three_. Nat is the ideal partner: she picks up his rhythm at once, follows his lead perfectly. Around them the music pounds, incongruous, bodies writhing. The man in the silver glasses continues to court his cell and not his suitor. But slowly Aleksander and Nat are attracting notice, are attracting stares. Puzzled ones, even mocking at first. But increasingly bewitched. _One-two-three, one-two-three_. Though the music hasn’t dimmed, Aleksander feels a hush sweeping over the room, like a drunken haze. Slowly, as if a spell has been cast, the world falls out of its usual rhythm and into 3/4ths time. 

Nat doesn’t skip a beat. Right on cue, she breaks from his grasp and sweeps into her arms a dreadlocked girl whose studious, cynical eyes succumb at once to Nat’s plentiful charms. Aleksander, in turn, catches himself a cowboy. The man is clumsy on his feet, making a quick casualty of Aleksander’s instep, but within a few turns he’s gazing trustingly into Aleksander’s eyes, his lips parted. Aleksander passes him back to his similarly chapeau’d friend; the next partner comes to him willingly. Very willingly. Aleksander allows the somewhat less than traditional adjustment to the waltzing position that this man prefers, smiling less from the hand on his ass and more at the sight that each new twirl presents: more and more dancers to the dance. When the speakers stop pumping Ke$ha in favor of the slow, seductive notes of “The Carousel Waltz,” Aleksander can’t help but look ceiling-ward, tilting his face up as if he’s expecting a commendation from the gods of music themselves.

When he glances back down again, he catches Nat’s stare, fragmented turn by turn as she whirls about in some big leather daddy’s arms. It’s admiration he sees there, he tells himself. He stepped onto this floor as nothing and now everywhere he looks he’s bathed in awe.

Silver frames certainly isn’t looking at his cell phone anymore. Still ignoring the overtures of soldier boy at his side, he stares at the figures moving in tandem all around him, _one-two-three, one-two-three_. When Aleksander swings close, holds out a hand, he comes to him like a meek little lamb. The phone gets tucked away or lost; his hands belong to Aleksander now, soft at his waist, sweaty against his palm. Aleksander smiles down at him, distractedly, glancing around for Nat, eager to share his triumph. Spots her dancing with a taller girl in a tank top. Catches her eye, and when the moment’s right, he slides his arm down his partner’s back, dipping him low enough that his head nearly scrapes the ground. The man’s hand grips tightly at Aleksander’s bare bicep, and through his spine and the spare muscles of his chest, Aleksander can feel his heart racing. His slim pale throat is bared.

Aleksander finds himself abruptly and irrevocably bored. Like he’s adjusting a fallen mannequin, he plops his partner back on his feet and wanders back to his waiting booth. He can see the bodies continue to move and sway, the song playing on, but the music has lost its magic for him. A cheap enchantment, he thinks, waving over a starry-eyed waiter to bring more shots.

Nat returns, an exhilarated sheen to her skin, in time to join him for a second round. “So do I win your little game?” he asks, dry through his wet lips.

Nat combs her fingers through her hair. “Does there have to be a winner?” 

Aleksander looks past her to the dance floor, where the spell has well and truly broken, their army of elegant waltzers now bumping and grinding with renewed abandon to something atonal and shrieky. “Doesn’t there?”

Nat lets out a laugh, which lessens not at all in the face of Aleksander’s irritated glare. “Are you eternally dissatisfied? You just did something kind of beautiful, Alek.”

And like most beautiful things, Aleksander thinks, so very pointless. He stares down at his shot glass, frowning; he doesn’t like the idea of becoming a morose drunk. He wets his lips, then looks up and straight into Nat’s eyes.

“And where did your dissatisfaction lie,” he asks, “with big, blond, and beardy?”

Nat sighs, and pours herself another drink; at some point, one of them appears to have persuaded the waiter to leave the bottle.

“Don was just so…possessive, you know?” she says, leaving Aleksander to infer that “Don” is the aforementioned blond with the penchant for plaid and melodramatics. “I don’t like to be tied down.” She laughs. “Well, I do, but not like that. I grew up in a tiny town, in a tiny house with _five brothers_. Someone always knew where I was and what I was up to.”

A couple of people, not the first, come by to offer Aleksander their vague and meaningless compliments and congratulations. Aleksander flashes a smile and sends them away, watching Nat. She knocks back another shot, swipes her tongue across her lips. “I’m _sooooo_ much happier here. I have my own place, my own life, I’m be—” She hiccoughs. “—holden to no one.”

It’s a touching story. Aleksander finds himself wanting to believe it—in spite of all the hazy, now half-remembered oddities of the encounter at the coffee shop, he wants everything Nat tells him to be true. And that, more than anything, is what makes oily distrust settle insidious in his gut.

He looks back out toward the dance floor, where either Will of the Masses or Aleksander’s impromptu waltz lesson has apparently convinced silver frames to let the burly G.I. into his arms. They’re all tangled together, legs and arms and mouths. Neither of them seems to be aware of how ludicrous this looks. Aleksander licks a drop of whiskey off his thumb. “Don’t you get lonely?”

For a moment, Nat’s eyes rake over him. Aleksander has worked hard to rid himself of self-consciousness, of any awareness of the fact that he might be being observed, studied, judged (as anything other than magnificent). But Nat’s face soon breaks out into a wide smile. She takes him by the hand. “When do I have time to be lonely?” she shouts, and leads him back out onto the dance floor.

***

Some time later, rude necessity rears its head. Aleksander begs Nat’s pardon and stumbles—no, slinks, he’s sure he is slinking toward the washroom. As he approaches the door, a man emerges, wide-eyed on hasty feet. _You must be new_ , Aleksander thinks, and brazenly pushes inside, awaiting some new form of entertainment within.

He is expecting any of a number of different things. None of them is the sight of the blond man from the coffee shop—Nat’s “ex-boyfriend Don”—standing, alone, with his back up against the far wall. He straightens when he recognizes Aleksander, muscular arms unfolding and falling to his sides, palms open.

Aleksander is newly struck by how familiar this man looks. He likes to think that he’s developed an excellent memory for faces, but he’ll still have the odd bad moment where he’ll encounter a random stranger on the street and feel a spark of recognition that is of course based on nothing—nothing real, at least. New York is a big city, but there are without a doubt plenty of people he’s passed and then passed again, recording them only briefly, out of the corner of his eye. Nat gave him a weird sense of deja vu when he first got to know her, too. And celebrities are the absolute worst.

No celebrity, though, has ever given Aleksander a look like the one big blond Don is giving him now: a look that suggests he likewise recognizes Aleksander, and not just from an uncomfortable encounter in a coffee shop. Aleksander meets his wary, hopeful stare, and exhales slowly. When he speaks his voice is smooth as silk. “Looking for someone?”

The man shifts his feet; his eyes never leave Aleksander’s face. “You—you came here with her?”

Aleksander knows he should be relieved by this answer—by the near-confirmation that everything is as (dull and ordinary as) Nat said. Her ex-boyfriend is creepy and possessive. Fine.

“Nat?” Aleksander says with a casual quirk of his head. “I did. But your stalking skills could use some work. I find it highly unlikely that she would choose to visit the _men’s_ room.”

“I’m not looking for her. But we haven’t much time,” the man says, all at once crowding closer. Aleksander, to his great disappointment, takes a step back—merely reevaluating the situation, he tells himself. Right.

The big man moves like he’s about to take Aleksander by the shoulders, then at the last second, he changes his mind. Impulsively, Aleksander seizes his wrists. They are thick, strong wrists—Aleksander doubts he’s strong enough to hold him, but the action startles the man into stillness, and that’s a start.

“Who are you?” he demands. He can see himself in the mirror over the man’s shoulder, sweaty from the dance floor, red-faced from the drink, his eyes blown black. “Do you know me?”

The man looks down at him. They are almost of a height, Aleksander realizes; it is only in his mind that the other man looms so large. “Are you happy?” he asks. “Br—Friend, tell me you are content, and I shall not trouble you again.”

Aleksander drops the man’s hands; despite his best efforts, his breath is coming in pants. “‘Friend’? Am I your _friend_?” For some reason the word comes out sounding like an accusation. “Do—you—know—who—I— _am_?” Aleksander demands, speaking each word slowly but losing the last in a shout.

The man looks anxiously over Aleksander’s shoulder, toward the door. “Tell me where you reside,” he says in a low, certain voice. “Tell me, and I will come to you. I will find you.”

He sounds like he’s promising to cross the arctic wastes for Aleksander’s sake. Aleksander would like to instantly dismiss any such display of passion as obviously insincere, but this strange man positively radiates honesty; Aleksander can sense his truth as profoundly as he can Nat’s lies. It would be deeply annoying if honesty weren’t something he was so desperately in need of. 

Aleksander searches the man’s big, broad face for any indication that he’s reading the situation—reading _him_ —wrong. Any sign of anything lurking behind the veil. But this man is maskless. _How dull_ , Aleksander tries to think, _what you see is what you get_. But his heart is calling out his own lies. His body feels primed, every nerve thrilling. He dips his fingers into his pocket and pulls out his personal card along with a small silver key. If he keeps the gestures elegant enough, it’ll disguise the fact that his hands are shaking.

The man takes the card, squints at it. “Aleksander Grant,” he reads.

There’s a note of disappointment in his voice. Aleksander raises a brow. “You were expecting someone else?” 

The man folds card and key away, and then his hands do grip Aleksander’s shoulders, swift and brief. “Expect _me_ ,” he says, and then with two most strident strides, he is gone.

Aleksander walks calmly to the sink and washes his hands. The running water reminds him of his original purpose, so he makes use of the urinal, then washes his hands again. He’s on something like the sixth reiteration of scrub-rinse-scrub when he realizes what he is doing and makes himself stop. He clutches the sides of the sink: cool against the reddened skin of his hands. His eyes skitter away from the face in the mirror.

No. _No_. He forces himself to look up. He smiles. He looks fucking fantastic—hair in close-cut curls around his head, beard neatly trimmed: like a Greek statue. He _is_ fucking fantastic. He came from nothing but mud and ash and he rose from them like a phoenix. Nat, Don—whoever they are, whoever they _really_ are, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need them. He is, by his own hand, Aleksander Grant, and he doesn’t need anyone.

Just the people he can use.

Truly slinky now, he exits the washroom. Finds Nat playing at being the meat in some touristy het couple’s sandwich. She extricates herself and wobbles over to him. “You were gone a long time,” she says. Eyes wide and guileless. 

Aleksander grins back. “Got up to some fun in the restroom,” he says, and spins her a merry tale.

***

Nat insists on walking him home, even though she is, by all appearances, drunker than he is. They share a cigarette on his front stoop. It starts to feel odd sitting there next to her: she looks so small and vulnerable. A vivid image of himself—his arms, his hands, knocking her back, driving the burning point of the cigarette into her eye—blossoms in his mind like a hothouse orchid. _She’d tell the truth then_ , he thinks, his mouth full of smoke, and then he shudders and coughs, grinding the cigarette into the cement, her hand a warm weight on his back.

He keeps his eyes on the street as he summons a cab for her. “Oh!” she says suddenly from where she’s sprawled against the patched seat, “your stuff! I forgot, I’m sorry!”

“I’ll come by tomorrow,” he assures her, letting out an indiscreet, catlike yawn. He rubs at the back of his head, attempting a hangdog look and a sheepish grin. “I suspect I will have great need of the coffee.”

Nat smiles at him, friendly and kind and almost certainly duplicitous. Perfidious bitch. “Thanks, Alek.”

Aleksander gives the roof of the cab a slap and steps back. “Sweet dreams.”

***

Aleksander feels wary entering his apartment. The door swings open beneath his touch. The lights are out, the only illumination the glow from the surrounding skyscrapers. Outside the living room’s wall of windows, the city looks like a foreign realm, exotic and distant. Aleksander stands for a moment, staring out, and then he hears the soft sound of footfalls, coming across the hardwood floors.

He looks up and the man from the bar is standing in the door to his bedroom. He fills it right up: he’s a man born, Aleksander thinks, to fill doorways, fill rooms, fill hearts and minds. Aleksander hates him a little for that: this natural command of a space Aleksander has worked so hard to make his own. 

In the dim light, the man’s features are cast in grey, but it’s as if the shadows cannot touch him. He crosses the room to where Aleksander waits and stands there, looking at him. After a moment, a smile sweeps haltingly across his big, open face. 

“I’ve been admiring your chambers,” he says. “They suit you. This,” he makes a nebulous gesture in Aleksander’s direction, “all suits you well. You have acquitted yourself admirably.”

“Have I,” says Aleksander. Breath. “And am I much changed since last you saw me?”

Doubt—confusion—hope: they flicker in turn across the man’s trusting features. Are those tears in his eyes? Aleksander feels a sympathetic pricking and puts all he has into sending it away.

Meanwhile, the other man’s emotions are welling up: a thunderstorm, a torrent. He grabs for Aleksander’s elbows, linking their forearms together as if they were warriors of old or something equally ridiculous. “Brother—”

The rage takes Aleksander like a bolt of lightning. He throws the man off. “No! I have no brother. Do you think it wasn’t drilled into me day after day? I have no one willing to come forward and claim me. You think they didn’t search? Doctors, police…everyone so eager to foist me off. I have no family to be found, none even to be coerced. I certainly have no _brother_.

“And besides,” he says, dancing closer again, feeling a sick satisfaction at the hurt that twists across the other man’s face. Like kicking a puppy. “You don’t look at me the way a brother should. Not,” wetting his lips, a darting flick of his tongue, “outside of some of the more charming regions of east Kentucky.”

The man frowns like he doesn’t quite take Aleksander’s meaning, or possibly doesn’t even know that Kentucky is a state. Aleksander sneers. He reaches out and grabs the man by the back of his neck, fingers pulling tight through the thick strands of his golden hair. He brings their faces together, close. “Either stop lying to me or put that mouth to better use.”

The man’s hands come up and mirror his. To Aleksander’s surprise, he makes no attempt to push Aleksander away—or better yet, to pull him closer. Instead he simply holds him, gentle, lowering his head so that they are touching brow to brow.

“I would never lie to you, Loki. I wish only to know that you are well, and for you to trust that I love you.”

The brief, unasked for sense of calm that had descended upon Aleksander cracks like an eggshell. His knees feel weak; he is shaking. His nails dig into the man’s neck as an unbelievable pain starts behind his eyes. He feels like he is being stabbed with a beam of pure light.

“What—what did you call me?”

The man hesitates. “Brother—”

“No,” Aleksander gasps. “Not that—”

He buckles. The man’s hands are strong around his back, catching him, holding him up. Aleksander scarcely feels them. Something vast and dark and glittering is building in his mind. It’s all, it’s everything, and it’s right—

“Oh,” he says, as knowledge and weight and memory come rushing back. His eyes are wide open, his fingers tearing like claws into the flesh of his brother’s arms. Yggdrasil trembles; he can feel its leaves shaking with his every hoarse intake of breath.

Slowly, he starts to smile.

“Thor,” he says.

And then quick as the Bifrost closing, it’s all snatched away into black.

***

Before he even opens his eyes, Aleksander knows that he’s going to have a headache. He can feel a thudding pressure in his skull, like his brain has the bass turned up too high. He bites his lip: the more focused jolt of pain is nicely steadying. He opens his eyes.

A large, extremely well-muscled man is lying next to him on the bed. Fully clothed, alas. But last night was apparently even more interesting than he remembers.

He remembers…Nat, the bar, something about Nat’s ex-boyfriend—Don, was it? He’d joined them, Aleksander supposes, and then Aleksander had brought him home? _Classy, Alek_ , he thinks raking his eyes over the slumbering blond, grinning to himself: there’s a headache cure if he ever saw one. Last night it looks like he was too drunk to take advantage of it. Pity. Still, some things are easily remedied.

***

Don makes the most delightful noises in his sleep. Deep rumbling moans that move through his body like rolling thunder. Aleksander settles between thighs like the strong spread of a tree. He rubs his hands against the rough denim until his palms are burning, mouth stretched obscenely, lips spit-slick and sore. Achingly full. He can feel himself, hard and straining against Don’s thigh; he imagines him waking and finding Aleksander humping his leg like a dog. Sweet rush of shame; he suckles, keening a little. Don’s eyelashes flutter, his still sleep-swayed hand sliding down his body to caress the top of Aleksander’s head. No: to hold him steady, push him deeper. Aleksander shivers with pleasure, sucking greedily. His eyes rolling in his head as he tries to focus on Don’s face as he wakens to _this_.

There: that lazy smile on his face, that dreamlike haze in his blinking blue eyes. He sighs and shakes and then he looks down, sees everything that is stretched before him, warm and real and not at all a dream: Aleksander as he licks along his foreskin and grins up at him with only his eyes.

Don’s mouth drops open like he’s about to speak, but any words are lost in an incoherent shout: he grabs Aleksander by the tight curls of his hair and comes with shocking force.

Somewhere around the time he feels come splash across his cheekbone, Aleksander joins him.

The next thing he knows, he’s been manhandled with impressive strength up the bed; Don is gently if a bit sloppily wiping clean his face. “Hey,” Aleksander says, “I might’ve been saving that for later”—which, fair enough, may not be his wittiest remark to date, but he doesn’t see why it should provoke the pained groan that Don lets out. All is forgiven, however, when Don follows this bit of baffling behavior by seizing Aleksander’s face in his big hands and kissing him fiercely, forcefully, repeatedly.

Aleksander becomes increasingly interested in divesting himself of his come-splattered $300 jeans. He squirms under Don’s strong hands, laughing when his fingers prove clumsy and inadequate to the task. He keeps catching himself chuckling as their desperation builds: he feels mad with it, delirious. Delicious. 

Freedom finds Don already hard again. Aleksander is doubly impressed. He starts to twist himself up onto his knees, but a firm hand on his shoulder shoves him back down to his back. “No,” Don says. A low growl. “Need to see you. Want to—”

“Yes,” Aleksander says. Spreads himself eagerly. “Now now now—”

 _Now_ , he says, and Don obeys; _hard_ , he says, and Don fulfills his command. _You want to look at me_ , he whispers, _you want to see me come apart on the head of your cock. You want to have me. Own me. Make me yours._

And, _Yes_ , Don answers, _Yes, yes_ — Until the headboard cracks against the wall like thunder.

***

When Aleksander gets out of the shower, he finds Don sitting on his sofa, head in his hands. He reminds Aleksander of a children’s book he remembers from the halfway house: some idiotic piece of drivel about a sad, bedraggled lion. Normally, these sorts of thoughts would mark the point where he’d feel himself starting to get bored; he searches his mind for the sensation, and finds instead only the desire to plunk himself down on Don’s big welcoming lap. Aleksander likes to answer his desires.

He forces Don’s head up and kisses him, enjoying the scrape of his beard against his own newly trimmed stubble. Don bites at his lip, then buries his face against Aleksander’s neck, murmuring. It’s his name, Aleksander realizes, coming out slurred and half-choked. “You know,” he says conversationally, forcing Don’s head up with a hand to his chin, pinching just a little. “I let my friends call me Alek.”

“Alek,” Don says haltingly, staring up at him with wet eyes. “I fear—”

Aleksander rolls his shoulders. “Nat won’t mind at all. Trust me, she’ll be grateful I’ve taken you off her hands.”

Don still looks skeptical: his silly sad cartoon lion. Aleksander feels strangely affectionate; must be the double orgasm. He slides off Don’s lap and stands, holds out a hand. “Come on,” he says, dropping his voice to something low and dramatic. “Let’s go confess our sins.”

***

Nat’s eyes widen a fraction of an inch when Don and Aleksander stumble in, their arms around each other’s backs, Aleksander’s hand making slow but steady progress down to Don’s ass. Aleksander knows her well enough by now to register this as an expression of supreme shock. But she recovers nicely: simply huffs out a breath and a muttered, “Oh, brother.”

Don stiffens sharply beside him, then withers under Nat’s inscrutable look and retreats to a corner table. Aleksander shrugs, sidling up to the counter with a grin. There, to his surprise, he hesitates. “Didn’t intend to snag your leftovers,” he says after a moment, by way of apology, “but you weren’t planning on finishing, were you?”

Nat glances from Aleksander to Don, then back; she lifts her chin. “I did warn you,” she says, hands busy with the cappuccino machine. “Possessive.”

Aleksander works a kink out of his neck, displaying several choice hickeys to anyone who might happen to be looking. “Haven’t minded so far.”

“Hmm,” is all Nat says. Two china cups clatter slightly as they hit the counter.

Aleksander feels a pang; irritating. “Hey,” he says, “last night…”

Last night…he feels like he remembers something, some ill will between them, a frisson of anger, mistrust. The thought makes him dizzy, makes the ache start up again behind his eyes. He shakes his head, forces it away.

“I didn’t,” he says, stumbling a little, unfamiliar, “I haven’t…upset you?”

“No.” Nat smiles at him, gentle and kind and, like Don, just a little bit sad. “I had fun last night,” she says, laying her hand atop his hand. “I’m glad we’ve become friends.”

Aleksander settles back on his heels, grinning wide and toothy. He can see an image of himself in his head, the lazy smile on his face as he glances between Don and Nat, the way his eyes sparkle. Easy, confident, sincere. He gives Nat’s fingers a squeeze. “Not half as glad as I am.”

**Author's Note:**

> There's definitely more to this story in my mind. I'm not always the best with ongoing series, but I've started a sequel and hope to continue. Each story should stand alone. Fingers crossed!
> 
> Title from the Elliot Smith song. Also: sorry, Kentucky. Cher Horowitz started it.


End file.
